eznet 1.11 review

Eznet makes setting up PPP for Linux easy

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 30K Developer: D. Richard Hipp

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Eznet makes setting up PPP for Linux easy. Just enter the name of your ISP, a phone number to dial, the login name, the password and the TTY and eznet takes care of the rest.

Setting up PPP under Linux can be intimidating, especially for newbies. Between chat scripts and a zillion options to pppd, setting up PPP can be a hassle for experienced users. It's a wonder beginners are able to do it at all.

``eznet'' is a new program designed to make it much easier to get PPP running under Linux. Basically all you have to do is supply a name for your ISP, a login name, password and phone number and eznet will do the rest. There are not configuration files to edit, no chat scripts to design and no need to figure out what a "chap-secret" is. Assuming you have pppd and eznet correctly installed (which should happen automatically from your CD-ROM, right?) the following command is all it takes to set up PPP:

eznet add service=NAME user=ABC password=XYZ phone=5551234

The setup command has to be entered as root. But after the setup is done, any user can bring up the PPP connection by simply typing:

eznet up NAME

If everything works right, you should have a PPP connection in 30 seconds or so. The ``eznet up'' command will not return until either the connection has been established, or the connection attempt fails. The command will return a non-zero result code if the connection attempt fails, making is suitable for use within shell-scripts. ``eznet up'' prints a status message just before it returns so that interactive users can also see what happened.

The connection established by eznet will automatically go down after 5 minutes of inactivity. Or you can bring it down manually by typing:

eznet down NAME

To see the current status of a connection, type:

eznet status

Eznet also supports demand dialing. If you have Eric Schenk's ``Diald'' package installed, you can start it up by typing:

eznet dialdon NAME

And turn diald back off using:

eznet dialdoff NAME

If you prefer to use the request-route feature of kerneld, then just write the following script into the file ``/sbin/request-route'':

#!/bin/sh
eznet up NAME

I prefer to use diald, since it seems to work better and because kerneld will not be supported in the 2.2.X kernels. But either method works.